Name: Anonymous 2012-11-28 18:01
I've always been interested in these, even if few people have a chance to experiment with them, so, yeah, let's do it.
Some 6502 derivatives feature dedicated store 0 and load 0 instructions, which saves a byte and (possibly, I don't remember) a cycle for a very common operation. Neat.
A lot of RISC architectures, on the other hand, feature a dedicated 0 register for this purpose -- iirc, in MIPS, register 0 is always 0. It seems at first glance that this would be more general and useful than load/store 0 instructions, but I'm having trouble thinking of a use for the register besides loading and storing 0 values. On second thought, maybe it's a waste of a register.
Some 6502 derivatives feature dedicated store 0 and load 0 instructions, which saves a byte and (possibly, I don't remember) a cycle for a very common operation. Neat.
A lot of RISC architectures, on the other hand, feature a dedicated 0 register for this purpose -- iirc, in MIPS, register 0 is always 0. It seems at first glance that this would be more general and useful than load/store 0 instructions, but I'm having trouble thinking of a use for the register besides loading and storing 0 values. On second thought, maybe it's a waste of a register.